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I recently switched to Mac OS X from Windows and I'm thrilled with the results. But then again, I only spent a short five-year stint on Windows NT and XP; before that I was strictly a Unix developer for 15 years, mostly on Sun Microsystems machines. I also was lucky enough to develop software under Nextstep, the lush Unix-based predecessor to Mac OS X, so I'm a little biased.

Aside from its beautiful Aqua user interface, Mac OS X is Unix, arguably the best operating system in existence. Unix has many cool features; one of the most well known is the pipe, which lets you create combinations of commands by piping one command's output to another's input. For example, suppose you want to list source files from the Struts source distribution that invoke or define a method named execute(). Here's one way to do that with a pipe:

The grep command searches files for regular expressions; here, I use it to find occurrences of the string execute( in files unearthed by the find command. grep's output is piped into awk, which prints the first token—delimited by a colon—in each line of grep's output (a vertical bar signifies a pipe). That token is a filename, so I end up with a list of filenames that contain the string execute(.

Now that I have a list of filenames, I can use another pipe to sort the list:

The wc command counts words, lines, and bytes. In this case, I specified the -l option to count lines, one line for each file. I also added a -u option to sort to ensure uniqueness for each filename (the -u option filters out duplicates).

Pipes are powerful because they let you dynamically compose a chain of operations. Software systems often employ the equivalent of pipes (e.g., email filters or a set of filters for a servlet). At the heart of pipes and filters lies a design pattern: Chain of Responsibility (CoR).

CoR introduction

The Chain of Responsibility pattern uses a chain of objects to handle a request, which is typically an event. Objects in the chain forward the request along the chain until one of the objects handles the event. Processing stops after an event is handled.

Figure 1 illustrates how the CoR pattern processes requests.

Figure 1. The Chain of Responsibility pattern

In Design Patterns, the authors describe the Chain of Responsibility pattern like this:

Avoid coupling the sender of a request to its receiver by giving more than one object a chance to handle the request. Chain the receiving objects and pass the request along the chain until an object handles it.

The Chain of Responsibility pattern is applicable if:

You want to decouple a request's sender and receiver

Multiple objects, determined at runtime, are candidates to handle a request

You don't want to specify handlers explicitly in your code

If you use the CoR pattern, remember:

Only one object in the chain handles a request

Some requests might not get handled

Those restrictions, of course, are for a classic CoR implementation. In practice, those rules are bent; for example, servlet filters are a CoR implementation that allows multiple filters to process an HTTP request.

Figure 2 shows a CoR pattern class diagram.

Figure 2. Chain of Responsibility class diagram

Typically, request handlers are extensions of a base class that maintains a reference to the next handler in the chain, known as the successor. The base class might implement handleRequest() like this:

The SpamFilter handles the request (presumably receipt of new email) if the message is spam, and therefore, the request goes no further; otherwise, trustworthy messages are passed to the next handler, presumably another email filter looking to weed them out. Eventually, the last filter in the chain might store the message after it passes muster by moving through several filters.

Note the hypothetical email filters discussed above are mutually exclusive: Ultimately, only one filter handles a request. You might opt to turn that inside out by letting multiple filters handle a single request, which is a better analogy to Unix pipes. Either way, the underlying engine is the CoR pattern.

In this article, I discuss two Chain of Responsibility pattern implementations: servlet filters, a popular CoR implementation that allows multiple filters to handle a request, and the original Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) event model, an unpopular classic CoR implementation that was ultimately deprecated.

Servlet filters

In the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)'s early days, some servlet containers provided a handy feature known as servlet chaining, whereby one could essentially apply a list of filters to a servlet. Servlet filters are popular because they're useful for security, compression, logging, and more. And, of course, you can compose a chain of filters to do some or all of those things depending on runtime conditions.

With the advent of the Java Servlet Specification version 2.3, filters became standard components. Unlike classic CoR, servlet filters allow multiple objects (filters) in a chain to handle a request.

Servlet filters are a powerful addition to J2EE. Also, from a design patterns standpoint, they provide an interesting twist: If you want to modify the request or the response, you use the Decorator pattern in addition to CoR. Figure 3 shows how servlet filters work.

If you access the servlet with the URL /filteredServlet, the auditFilter gets a crack at the request before the servlet. AuditFilter.doFilter writes to the servlet container log file and calls chain.doFilter() to forward the request. Servlet filters are not required to call chain.doFilter(); if they don't, the request is not forwarded. I can add more filters, which would be invoked in the order they are declared in the preceding XML file.

Now that you've seen a simple filter, let's look at another filter that modifies the HTTP response.

Example 4 lists a filter that performs a simple search and replace in the body of the response. That filter decorates the servlet response and passes the decorator to the servlet. When the servlet finishes writing to the decorated response, the filter performs a search and replace within the response's content.

The preceding filter looks for filter init parameters named search and replace; if they are defined, the filter replaces the first occurrence of the search parameter value with the replace parameter value.

SearchAndReplaceFilter.doFilter() wraps (or decorates) the response object with a wrapper (decorator) that stands in for the response. When SearchAndReplaceFilter.doFilter() calls chain.doFilter() to forward the request, it passes the wrapper instead of the original response. The request is forwarded to the servlet, which generates the response.

When chain.doFilter() returns, the servlet is done with the request, so I go to work. First, I check for the search and replace filter parameters; if present, I obtain the string associated with the response wrapper, which is the response content. Then I make the substitution and print it back to the response.

StringWrapper, which decorates the HTTP response in Example 4, is an extension of HttpServletResponseWrapper, which spares us the drudgery of creating a decorator base class for decorating HTTP responses. HttpServletResponseWrapper ultimately implements the ServletResponse interface, so instances of HttpServletResponseWrapper can be passed to any method expecting a ServletResponse object. That's why SearchAndReplaceFilter.doFilter() can call chain.doFilter(request, wrapper) instead of chain.doFilter(request, response).

Now that we have a filter and a response wrapper, let's associate the filter with a URL pattern and specify search and replace patterns: